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View Full Version : Problems with picture quality on Tivo - colour banding or "billowing"


algordon
06-17-2006, 07:16 AM
I've had for some time now PQ problems when watching through Tivo. It's not the signal 'cos I've had that checked. I can also rule out I think the STB 'cos I've used three so far and the problem's been the same with all of them. I started with an OnDigital box, then moved to a SetPal one - a Labgear - and am now using a Netgem i-Player.

Basically the picture seems pretty soft - which I could live with - but when you get a scene with a single colour background - say a wall in an office or anything like that - I get what I'd call a "billowing" effect. It looks like clouds, is the best way to describe it.

I contacted TivoHeaven to see if an upgrade might fix the problem but the guy there was honest enough to say - if I recollect rightly - that what I'd described wasn't a known Tivo problem and that an upgrade wouldn't necessarily fix it. (He described the problem as colour "banding".)

I did use a scaler until recently with my Pioneer 435 plasma but that made no difference.

I'm not at all techie-minded so it may be that somewhere I've set something up wrongly. The plasma was professionally installed, altho I don't think they checked the Tivo or STB as these were already in use before with a (Loewe) CRT TV. Unfortunately I can't now be sure what the picture was like back then, altho I dimly recollect it was better.

Since I've got a plasma I've considered the mode 0 upgrade and have looked at the threads on that but firstly amn't sure this would cure the problem and secondly am worried about the flashes I keep reading about.

Anybody else had this problem?

Automan
06-17-2006, 08:41 AM
Is the picture okay when you press aux key on the Tivo remote thus bypassing Tivo?

Automan.

sanderton
06-17-2006, 12:02 PM
If you view a Sky (or Freeview, but Sky is worse) picture on a plasma or LCD you will get some of that colour banding effect; it's an artifact of the MPEG encoding. Running it though a TiVo will make it worse as it's been through two encodings.

It's much less visible on a CRT TV, although 100Hz CRTs also make it worse.

Modeo 0 and upping the bitrate does help, but ultimately SD on as plasma looks like that. I would have expected a scaler to help a bit too.